Current Topics in Neurology and Pediatric Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology

Wanda Phipatanakul, MD, MS, director of the Asthma Clinical Research Center at Boston Children’s Hospital and Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, has dedicated her career to reducing and preventing asthma and allergic diseases.

Originally from St. Louis, she earned her medical degree from Loma Linda University and completed her residency in pediatrics at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles in 1997. After a fellowship in immunology at Johns Hopkins University, she joined the faculty in the Division of Immunology and Allergy at Boston Children’s and Harvard Medical School, where she has remained for nearly 2 decades.

Dr. Phipatanakul has built a deep network of community relationships, and she conducts both school- and home-based asthma studies in children and has had continuous NIH funding for nearly 20 years. She leads the NIAID School Inner-City Asthma Intervention Study and the NHLBI Environment Assessment of Sleep in Youth, and overall PI for a NIAID funded, nationwide, multicenter asthma prevention study evaluating omalizumab (anti-IgE) in preventing the atopic march and asthma. Most recently she was awarded a NIAID U01 evaluating whether patients carrying a IL4RαR576gene variant, will have a greater response to dupilumab.

She leads her Center as Pediatric PI in multiple NHLBI asthma and prevention networks, including Precise and has authored over 220 publications in scientific journals, including JAMA and the New England Journal of Medicine. She is passionate about successfully mentoring the next generation of investigators, and has received multiple mentoring awards for her efforts. She also enjoys serving the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology and the American Board of Allergy and Immunology in support of her specialty and serving as a role model to others balancing work and family.

Dr. William O. Tatum IV is professor in the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, and senior consultant in the Department of Neurology at Mayo Clinic Florida. He is a Fellow in the American Academy of Neurology, American Neurological Association and the American Clinical Neurophysiology Society. He is board-certified in Neurology, Clinical Neurophysiology, and Epilepsy and serves as the current director for the Comprehensive Epilepsy Center and Epilepsy Monitoring Unit at the Mayo Clinic in Florida.

He completed his medical education at the College of Osteopathic Medicine and Surgery in Des Moines, Iowa, neurology residency at Loyola University Medical Center in Chicago, Illinois, and a two-year epilepsy fellowship at Graduate Hospital affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania. After training, he relocated to Tampa, Florida pioneering Tampa General Hospital-University of South Florida Comprehensive Epilepsy Center before joining the Mayo Clinic in 2009 as a clinician-educator.

He is a past president of the board of the American Board of Clinical Neurophysiology and the American Clinical Neurophysiology Society, currently serving as the Chair for the clinical neurophysiology section of the American Academy of Neurology. He has served on the board of directors for the American Board of Registration of EEG Technologists and Evoked Potentials, and currently serves on the board of the Epilepsy Foundation of America. He has been principal investigator in pharmacologic and device clinical trials with research interests in drug-resistant epilepsy, seizure semiology and EEG/clinical neurophysiology.

He has authored 160 peer-reviewed manuscripts, 35 book chapters and edited/co-edited 8 books in the field of epilepsy and clinical neurophysiology. He serves on the current editorial board for the Journal of Clinical Neurophysiology as Associate Editor, and is the Editor-in-Chief for Epilepsy and Behavior Reports. He has presented lectures at national and international meetings as an invited lecturer.